Nik Software for Photoshop

I had previously looked into the Nik plugins for Photoshop, but at $500 decided to defer any purchase until I felt I was ready.  The plugins include HDR Efex Pro 2 for HDR manipulations, Silver Efex Pro 2 for black and white images, Sharpener Pro 3 for sharpening images, Color Efex Pro 4 for color correction and manipulation, Viveza 2 for tonality adjustments, and Dfine2 for noise reduction.

Well, today I saw a notice on Moose Peterson's blog that the package was available at $149.  For that price, I decided to buy.

Below are two images - the first is the one I posted here a few days ago, and the second one has some tweaks using the Nik plugins.

What do you think?  Please use the comments feature to let me know which you prefer and what, if anything, you find annoying or appealing about the results.

Thanks!

As Originally Posted

After Manipulation with Nik

What did I do?  First, I used the HDR Efex to pump up the blues and the browns without impacting the whites and blacks.  Then I used the sharpener to bring out more detail at the edges of things.  For instance, if you click on the bottom image and use the magnifier, you can see that the killdeer has some "teeth" on the top beak - something I had not realized previously.  Also, in the bottom image, you can actually see some structure in the eye - iris and pupil.  Again, something I had not seen in any of my killdeer images previously.  Now, if you look closely at the top image, both of these can be observed, but they are much clearer to me in the bottom image.

The Nik Collection is available here.

Just for fun, I decided to go a bit farther out on the HDR limb with the pair of photos below.  This is an illustration of how you can manipulate images to have more pop.

Original

After Nik Manipulation

My elementary understanding is that you see more detail in the lower image because the software tones down the brighter parts of the image and pumps up the darker ones to even out the tonal range.